Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to file operations in a file management data processing system and more particularly to file copy and move operations.
Description of the Related Art
The operating system requisite to the operation of any computer system provides two basic functions: loading and managing the operation of a computer program and storing and retrieving data in data files stored in fixed storage or memory of the computer system. For many decades, numerous file operations such as create, delete, open, move and copy were included as programmatic modules of the operating system distribution. In this regard, file copying and moving remain the most common file operations performed by computer users.
There are many third party computer programs directed to file operations. One commercially available tool provides file operational capabilities above and beyond those included as part of the traditional disk operating system—namely the “copy” and “xcopy” commands. Some of the notable capabilities include the ability to tolerate network interruptions and resume copying, the ability to correctly copy file data, attributes and preserve original timestamps, the ability to automatically retry a programmable number of times if a file cannot be opened, the ability to skip files that already appear in the destination folder with identical size and timestamp, and the ability to copy large numbers of files that would otherwise crash the built-in XCOPY utility.
However, most third party add-on tools treat files in an operating system in the same way during file copying and moving regardless of the file type or other information about the files. More particularly, while on the surface, files appear the same to a computer in terms of structure, some files, depending upon the type of file, or the content of the file, can be handled faster or in better ways by utilizing different computational behaviors during basic file operations. For example, the modern Web browser performs the create file operation on a downloaded file differently in that files can be downloaded to different folders according to file extensions or keywords. Just the same, launching execution of a file can invoke a supporting file viewer depending upon a file extension of the file.